Windfarm Sickness

via Wikimedia Commons

 ...is pretty much a myth, according to new research. It's spread by word-of-mouth rather than windfarms. From the Guardian:

Sickness being attributed to wind turbines is more likely to have been caused by people getting alarmed at the health warnings circulated by activists, an Australian study has found. Complaints of illness were far more prevalent in communities targeted by anti-windfarm groups, said the report's author, Simon Chapman, professor of public health at Sydney University. His report concludes that illnesses being blamed on windfarms are more than likely caused by the psychological effect of suggestions that the turbines make people ill, rather than by the turbines themselves.

"If windfarms were intrinsically unhealthy or dangerous in some way, we would expect to see complaints applying to all of them, but in fact there is a large number where there have been no complaints at all," Chapman said.

The report, which is the first study of the history of complaints about windfarms in Australia, found that 63% had never been subject to noise or health complaints. In the state of Western Australia, where there are 13 windfarms, there have been no complaints.

The study shows that the majority of complaints (68%) have come from residents near five windfarms that have been heavily targeted by opponent groups. The report says more than 80% of complaints about health and noise began after 2009 when the groups "began to add health concerns to their wider opposition".

If You Won't Stop Climate Change...

...then you should learn to love it. As it is becoming clear that we will not be doing a damn thing to stop global warming and the resulting chaos, we'd better plan on doing things differently in order to maintain our current capitalist lifestyles. Thus:

From the Daily Mail Online

The area around this house is expected to flood every 20 years or so, and so this house is designed to cut loose from its foundation and float when that happens. The house is nearing completion in Marlow, Buckinghamshire.
The Guardian ran a short clip on the designers and the development that's been proposed.

From the article:

They may lack the exotic ring of Venice's Piazza San Marco or Marrakech's Djemaa el-Fna, but Norwich's planned Rain Square and Flood Park may one day earn a little renown of their own in the epic battle with the weather.
After England's wettest year on record, planners this spring will be asked to grant consent to 670 homes by the confluence of the Wensum and Yare rivers featuring these new public spaces, where half the site has a high probability of flooding and its edge is only 45cm (18in) above sea level.
The project, described as a folly by opponents, is a bellwether for Britain's readiness to tackle the twin pressures of rising floodwaters – which the Environment Agency estimates put one in six homes at risk – and ever increasing housing demand in popular places such as Norwich.
In a counter-intuitive attempt to persuade homebuyers to set aside their fear of the rising tide, the scheme proposes homes around marshes, squares that are designed to become ponds, and parks that become small lakes.

So really, why bother to fix the problem when 1 in 6 homes may be at risk of flooding, when that just gives you the opportunity for business as usual selling these creations? From the same article:

The Guardian has learned that the government chose to delay the introduction of critical anti-flood measures until 2014 after lobbying by Britain's biggest house builders. Regulations to demand better drainage of new housing developments using wetlands, reed beds, drainage channels and porous driveways to help prevent run-off flooding that threatens an estimated 2.8m homes was postponed last year after the Home Builders Federation complained to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) about the cost.
Barratt Homes, Redrow, Bovis and other house builders were supposed to take responsibility for building systems to ensure water that drains from new estates soaks into the ground rather than running off to cause flooding locally. But they have written to Defra minister Richard Benyon saying the standards, which have been championed by ecologists and flood experts, are "flawed and would raise design, cost and other problems for house builders". They also warned the scheme would "present a significant risk to the delivery of new housing", and the government announced an 18-month delay.

This, this is why we're all going to die. Probably screaming.

Fire Tornado

yeah, exactly what the title says. The Guardian has posted a video of what happens when a twister meets a bushfire in Australia.

I don't know about you, but that strikes me as both really cool and really scary.

One Step Closer

George Monbiot, from his website

One of the principals of democracy is that all persons are equal before the law. That this is not so is pretty much self-evident, does not need me listing case after case as proof, and is one of the major failings of our system. But we're getting one step closer, at least in the UK.
Public intellectual and professional gadfly George Monbiot has set up a bounty fund to further the attempt to bring former UK PM Tony Blair to account in front of the International Criminal Court at the Hague. He also wrote a piece September 3rd about how the philosophical and societal support for different types of justice for different people is beginning to crack apart. An excellent article, and well worth reading more than this excerpt:

For years it seems impregnable, then suddenly the citadel collapses. An ideology, a fact, a regime appears fixed, unshakeable, almost geological. Then an inch of mortar falls, and the stonework begins to slide. Something of this kind happened over the weekend.
When Desmond Tutu wrote that Tony Blair should be treading the path to The Hague, he de-normalised what Blair has done. Tutu broke the protocol of power – the implicit accord between those who flit from one grand meeting to another – and named his crime. I expect that Blair will never recover from it.
The offence is known by two names in international law: the crime of aggression and a crime against peace. It is defined by the Nuremberg principles as the "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression". This means a war fought for a purpose other than self-defence: in other words outwith articles 33 and 51 of the UN Charter.
That the invasion of Iraq falls into this category looks indisputable. Blair's cabinet ministers knew it, and told him so. His attorney general warned that there were just three ways in which it could be legally justified: "self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UN security council authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case." Blair tried and failed to obtain the third.

After Capitalism

In the vein of becoming the change we want to see in the world, The Guardian is hosting a forum called "After Capitalism."
In the following animation, George Monbiot takes on something of what we mean by "capitalism" and what a different future might hold.

Mr. Monbiot has taken the time to post the text of the video.

To answer the question of what the world will look like after capitalism, we first have to decide what we mean by capitalism. If it means a system that arises from lending money at interest, then there will be no “after capitalism”. Even when usury was banned on pain of execution or excommunication, it continued, so powerful was the profit drive. While executing bankers has much to commend it, it’s likely to be ineffective. Lesser measures would produce even poorer results.
If on the other hand capitalism means something like the current dispensation, which allows a few people to seize much of the wealth generated by everyone, which blocks social mobility, which re-engineers the political system to serve the economic elite, then, yes, there’s a lot we can do about it.
For the past 200 years, men and women have fought stoicly for political democracy. Now we should fight for economic democracy. The natural wealth of the world, its land, its soils, its crops, minerals, water, forests, fish, is limited. The wealth arising from its use and multiplied through all the complex layers of the modern economy, is also limited, bounded ultimately, as the subprime mortgage crisis showed us, by the real value of assets in the physical world. Just as it was wrong for monarchs and aristocrats to concentrate so much political power in their hands, so it is wrong that billionaires and corporations should be permitted to seize so much of the common treasury of humankind: the wealth arising from the use of a finite planet.

Environmental Overshoot

Yasuni national park is the most biodiverse region on Earth.
Photograph: Corbis via The Guardian

From The Guardian:

In international bodies, biodiversity loss was long treated as a poor cousin to climate change. But this is changing amid growing awareness that both are approaching dangerous tipping points as a result of human pressures. Earlier this year, a group of leading scientists warned that biodiversity loss could result in a "global-scale state shift".
"Much as the consensus statements by doctors led to public warnings that tobacco use is harmful to your health, this is a consensus statement by experts who agree that loss of Earth's wild species will be harmful to the world's ecosystems and may harm society by reducing ecosystem services that are essential to human health and prosperity," noted Prof Bradley Cardinale, an associate professor at the University of Michigan who led the study published in Nature. "We need to take biodiversity loss far more seriously – from individuals to international governing bodies – and take greater action to prevent further losses of species."
But the trend is in the opposite direction. WWF says we are in an ecological overshoot situation in which it now takes 1.5 years for the Earth to regenerate what we use in a year. [emphasis mine]